Twitter is building a machine to convert 140 characters on Barack Obama, Ashton Kutcher, narcissism, the struggle for human freedom, and Starbucks into cash—and quick, before its moment passes. Is this asking too much of even the world’s best technologists?

"Before I lived in Paris, I didn’t really understand how one could have a love affair with a city..." Rebekkah Dilts on Paris:

"Later that first evening, I walked back to my new home after drinking wine with friends on the Champs de Mars, the park that surrounds the Eiffel Tour. I was in disbelief at what seemed extraordinary luck and fumbled to get the strange hunks of metal which were my very complicated French keys to open the front door of the apartment. I twisted and turned in vain, and then suddenly, a hand on the other side of the door swung it open. A handsome young man with intensely blue eyes and an inquisitive smile was standing at the threshold. He was one of my host parents’ two sons: 28, a naval engineer who loved to travel, rock climb, discuss history and eat ice cream. Over the course of the next year, we would live across the hall from one another and I would quickly fall in love with him.

"He has a lot to do with my loving Paris, but I think my love took shape in him as a common representation–when set free, it expanded into so much more. It was connected to all the components of the city and that time in my life, one of the most intense kinds of love I’ve ever known. I pressed myself into his delicate antiquity, which was that of Paris–I breathed it, and I wanted nothing more than for it to take me in."